


there is no wind that blows right for the sailor who doesn’t know where the harbour is

by oncewewerezombies



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternian Empire, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Dream Bubbles (Homestuck), Gen, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Mind Control, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-18
Updated: 2020-02-18
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:27:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22786396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oncewewerezombies/pseuds/oncewewerezombies
Summary: The Orphaner Dualscar reflects, at the end of the universe.Written for theCoolscar zine.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 23





	there is no wind that blows right for the sailor who doesn’t know where the harbour is

You are four sweeps old when a gang of lowbloods object to the way you speak and your manner of holding yourself and decide to vent their frustrations by scarring you across your face with a broken bottle. The scar is something you lie about for the rest of your life. It's not something that fits how you like to present yourself; when you allow yourself to be coaxed into telling the story of the jagged lines that cut you from above one eyebrow then diagonally down your face almost to the jaw on the other side, the true story is not something you ever tell. A fight, perhaps, but with you giving as good as you got, or perhaps a lusus hunt where the beast turned on you at the end. That sort of story usually winds up with a much more friendly reception, a little cooing and crooning about how brave you are, and how it must have hurt. It had hurt when you'd gotten it, it'd hurt while it healed up. It still hurts, on cold season nights when you're out on the ocean, among the wind and the spray.

In the end, it's what gives you a name. Orphaner Dualscar. You don't regret it, but you'd made a point of remembering horns and signs and later when you were grown, you'd made a special point to show just how foolish it was to make an enemy of a longlived highblood. Especially with the kind of behaviour that was guaranteed to pull a grudge into seething, festering being within a troll's cardiopusher. No fucking scumblood is gonna mark you and get the fuck away with it.

You make sure they don’t.

You are seven sweeps old when you enter the Royal Academy. It's an honour. It's your duty. You hate every fuckin moment of it. Living on a reef in the middle of nowhere with a skyhorse lusus wasn't a real showboat ride, it wasn't _fun_. But you could control your own comings and goings, you had a lot more fuckin allowance to do what you wanted. Coming under the command of the coyly sneering tutors of the Royal Academy is a shock to the system, like moving from saltwater to fresh. It ain’t conducive to a man’s sense of style, is what you’re saying here.

You make do. You learn how to flatter and flirt, how to act the courtier the way they all seem to do here and how to use a careful flutter of fins to get attention when you want it. You learn what it means to truly _command_. You learn what _they_ mean by it at the Academy, what it’ll mean when you reach an age to join the Fleet and Her Imperial Majesty’s service, at least, and you do what you can to learn what really matters despite the frippery that beckons anyone who thinks kissing the right ass is gonna get them what they want. It probably will, but you’re also pretty sure that they won’t get to keep it. That’s the way it works here on Alternia, you’ve learned that.

You are ten sweeps old when your shoulder is tapped for the honour of being an Imperial Huntsman, colloquially known as an 'Orphaner' (because of what happens after you take a lusus for the Great Carbuncle, it’s not your fault, it’s going to be someone and you might as well get the benefit of crying wigglers). It makes all of the nonsense you’ve gone through worth it. It had fucking better, anyway (it doesn’t). You’re young (too young, you heard one of your ‘peers’ mutter) and strong, you’ve got a rifle that could blast out half the sky on your shoulder and you took a knee in front of Her Imperious Condescension, and She’d smiled at you, personal like. You think She was, anyways. You want to think She was. 

You cherish that moment to yourself for sweeps of blissful self-deception. It gives you something to think over in the dead noon of the day when you’re meant to be asleep in your recuperacoon. In between your sopor-soothed dayterrors, you dream of becoming something more to the Empress than just one of her Orphaners. Special. You know you’re special, you’re one of a kind. Ain’t ever really had reason to think it, but you’ve always _known_ it all the same. As long as you live, you never really manage to crush out the sense that you’ve been _chosen_ for _something_ out of the back of your thinkpan, and you never quite manage to hide it either. It makes you your share of enemies, and you just keep _waiting_. For the moment you’ve been chosen for, the reason for your whole life to appear.

It _never_ does.

You are twelve sweeps old, give or take a cycle, when you properly see the Carbuncle Herself. Despite all the time you've been feeding the Beast, you had never seen Her before this. You’d heard from other Orphaners in the fleet that She sometimes rose to feed, but usually you just dump your catch and tow it deep enough to get to the marker and then swim on out of there. No point making a target of yourself, if you don’t have ta. You’ve learned that. It took you a while, but eventually even you fucking learn.

The lusus of Her Imperious Condescenscion is like a coral blooming, like a storm forming on the horizon. White tentacles come up to grab the skywhale you’d been towing deep enough for Her to grab when She felt the urge to nibble on something, and you hang suspended in the sea like a stalk of seaweed, too awestruck to swim away like you should. What good would swimming away even fuckin’ do you, now would it?

It’s a beautiful, terrible thing to see Gl'bgolyb, waiting in the depths. A monstrous wonder. You don’t know why the Empress keeps away from her own lusus and depends on a fleet of sworn trolls to feed Her instead. It’s meant to be bad luck to see the Carbuncle, so you don’t let on to your crew that you did. It’s a good thing that you’ve made a habit of doing the swim to the underwater marker alone, and that you’d done so this time. 

You’re not a superstitious man, and it doesn’t mean anything that you’ve seen Gl'bgolyb more than once.

You are barely fifteen sweeps old when you seek out the Grand Highblood to find a way of disposing of a mutual problem. There's things you've done because of Mindfang, things you've done for her and you've gloried in the pitch black emotions that had roiled through you during your kismessitude. You’d thought she was the one, the pitch obsidian desire of your aggression gland. She was older than you, and swept through the seas like a typhoon, thumbing her nose at every Imperial expectation of her hemocaste. She was _glorious_ , and you hated her every fibre with an intensity that made your nights an excitement and a savage wonderful kind of joy.

You’re not a good person. You’ve done things that ain’t what you’d call exactly fuckin’ ethical, you don’t get to be where you are by keeping your hands clean. You’re an Orphaner, for fuck’s sake. 

But you’ve never pailed someone who wasn’t willing, and the idea that you’ve pailed someone who _would_ makes your hungersack turn over, acid curling in your gut. Mindfang reacts like you thought maybe she would when you tell her you’re breaking it off, too much of a coward to look proper at the Jade blooded slave sitting with a slack face at her side. When you’d swept your way off her ship with a dramatic flare of your cape, the first thing you’d done is go to your cabin and puke. 

You gotta make a plan. Something. You gotta think of something.

You are barely fifteen sweeps old when you die. It is not kind but it is quick, it is ignominious and you are sure that some would say that it is what you deserve. Maybe going to see the Grand Highblood had been a mistake - it was - but you’d needed something more sure than naval aggression. Church law had some of the longest reaching grasping fronds on the planet, and you’d thought that you’d be able to talk your way in, and out again.

You’d been half fucking right.

You think of something and in retrospect, it’s _so fucking stupid_. You’ve always been stupid as shit when you lose your futile sense of hope and give in to whatever else you’re feeling at the time. Just the way you are.

Dying hurts a whole fucking lot. It’s not the first time violet blood colours the stones of the chorthedral, and you doubt it’s the last. The Grand Highblood’s club comes down on your skull with a sickening thump of finality, and death is agony for what seems like an endless moment. You don’t get a chance to beg for your life once he decides he’s listened to you for long enough, just enough of a moment to realise that the mecurial clown is going to cull you where you stand and you’re glad to keep that much dignity to yourself. 

You are hundreds of sweeps old and you have been dead for a very long time. You don't encourage people to seek you out, and you don't go looking for them either. The dreambubbles are vast and what reason do you have to venture any further than the ones you've built for yourself out of memories and the debris that the horrorterrors had gifted all of you reset souls with? None. You don't have quadrants (not any more) and you don't have _friends_. Foolish thought, aha. When does someone like you have friends? Why would you want them, or need them?

There have been people you’ve seen, more than once but they didn’t seem to find your memories comforting to stay in. Dark storms and seas, the rougher sides of docks and gleaming palaces. You punish yourself with what you remember, gliding between one part of your life than another. If you’d lived longer, the way someone of your blood was meant to (a hundred sweeps, more, more like five hundred and then you’d only just be hitting your prime), maybe you’d have had more to dress up the scenes from your memories. You’ve got what you’ve got.

It’s not like they’re all bad. 

Tonight, you’re dreamed yourself into a memory of one of the nicer port cities. The roads are properly lit and nicely wide, although it’s without the prosperous bustle that it had had in real life. It’s just you, sitting at one of the benches near the docks, trying to dream your way into what it sounded like when you weren’t the only one here. For a moment when you hear it, you think the sound of footfalls is just part of your overactive imagination working for you for once, instead of against you. 

It’s not your imagination. It’s someone actually being here. You turn in your seat, earfins flicking up and widening out a little to help you catch every skerrick of sound you can. Someone’s walking up the road towards you and since your earfins are already flared, they don’t go wider in a spasm of surprise when you see the face of the troll intruding on your solitude.

It’s _you_.

Or to be more accurate, it’s a could have been you. You’re fifteen sweeps alive to his eight or so (or nine, you can’t remember what the last adolescent told you about Beforus, about their team and who was in it but they’d known you and your horns, known your name), and you feel so much fucking older than that. He’s existed longer than you have, but he looks so _young_ , and suddenly afraid. You don’t like that much, so you pull yourself together and slim your fins down, relaxing into your chair and kicking out the one on the other side of the table.

“Cronus Ampora,” you say, and taste your name on your tongue like it doesn’t belong to you. You enjoy his shock, but why wouldn’t you know his name? He’s you. You’re him. You’d both just taken different routes to end up here anyway, dead and alone. But maybe...not so alone, any more. “I think I’ve been waiting for you.”


End file.
